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NVIDIA GTX 680: Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu 12.04

Phoronix: NVIDIA GTX 680: Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu 12.04

Following up on the performance comparison earlier this month of comparing Intel Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge graphics between Windows and Linux, up today are the results of a comparison of Windows 7 to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS when using a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 "Kepler" graphics card.

I'm surprised it did as well as it did - I had to use metacity because gaming performance was pretty well murdered by compiz in this release. Even better, the unredirecting pixmap option breaks compiz when enabled.

While the performance seems to be comparable, I wonder how much performance improvement we'll see using Wayland. Will this push the linux graphics stack past windows? It'll be nice having a display server without all the X11 cruft that was based on 1980's graphics cards either way.

While the performance seems to be comparable, I wonder how much performance improvement we'll see using Wayland. Will this push the linux graphics stack past windows? It'll be nice having a display server without all the X11 cruft that was based on 1980's graphics cards either way.

Too bad Nvidia doesn't play to support the protocol... yet.

There is one thing which can shatter this dream. The proprietary driver is already so detached from X, that removal of X could make no difference. Of course, the free drivers have more potential. Some old hardware already performs better than on Windows.

I'd be more interested in seeing the occasional comparison of the two doing something like running the Cycles renderer in Blender rather than these same few games each time. Unfortunately you can't really compare the AMD and NVIDIA cards (since Catalyst drivers have botched up OpenCL support), but you can compare like with like.

There is one thing which can shatter this dream. The proprietary driver is already so detached from X, that removal of X could make no difference. Of course, the free drivers have more potential. Some old hardware already performs better than on Windows.

X.Org isn't the reason 3D performance is poor on open source drivers anyways. Mesa is the problem with 3D graphics stack. X.Org does have some issues, like in events and input, things that make compositing difficult. Things like running multiple drivers at the same time, and GPGPU computing are difficult because of X. X.Org nor X11 impose any significant limitation on the performance 3D games.

Care to explain? I've successfully used the Catalyst drivers + APPSDK for OpenCL development on both Windows 7 and Ubuntu (11.04 and 11.10 at least). Did they break something in the newest versions that I haven't heard about?